Conventionally, print control apparatuses and the like often have a function of temporarily spooling and holding a print job in a given format, e.g., an intermediate code format before being converted into a command to a printer before an image is actually printed on a paper sheet upon printing data such as text data, image data, or the like edited by an application program for editing text or image data. Some of such apparatuses can combine a plurality of held print jobs into a single job.
Also, a print preview function of displaying held print jobs on a window in a layout to be printed to present them to the user is known.
However, even an apparatus with the function of combining print jobs cannot designate the way they are combined. For example, when print jobs to be combined have a layout in which one page is printed on one surface of a sheet, they need only be simply combined and printed. On the other hand, some layouts such as two-sided print and N-up print (that prints N pages laid out on a single surface of a sheet) cannot uniquely determine how to combine the jobs. In this manner, even when the way the jobs are combined cannot be uniquely determined, jobs are combined by a given method.